Members

Members

eurobabes

[	userinfo	\|	livejournal userinfo	]
[	archive	\|	journal archive	]

[Sep. 6th, 2008|11:19 am]

august32nd

so the toronto international film festival starts this week. you're probably thinking i'm going to list a whole bunch of stuff i've seen. well not really. i never got around to writing about what i saw last year (about 10 films). there's also some from the year before i never got around to mentioning (about 20). now i wish i did write about them because i can't remember half of them.

all i know is that i'm scaling down the number of films i choose to see for various reasons: things that will come out, things that will come out eventually, and things that i don't care if they never come out ever. tickets for the last few years are $20 a pop, another reason to carefully consider what to see. getting advance coupons are a but cheaper but not by much. you can stand around and wait for someone with an extra ticket to unload for cheap. i did that last year and was hassled by a cop for blocking (non-existent) traffic. when i pointed out that other people were doing the exact thing he ignored that. the difference being those people were much older and wealthier than me.

anyway, i'll start off with two from last year:

film: nightwatching
director: peter greenaway
co-product of everyone in europe with money

this was fantastic. it's about Rembrandt being commisioned to paint The Night Watch. is there a hex on greenaway's filmography this past decade or what? the 2003 tulse luper suitcase series is still barely available anywhere. it's flawed but ambitious as greenaway can get. that idea of having 92 dvds and websites accompanying the series will likely never happen. and now a year later nightwatching hasn't been seen outside the festival circuit. it's actually his most user-friendly film to date. it looked fantastic at the elgin theatre, even though it's full of people dressed up nice and acting like they're going the the fucking opera. afterwards we stuck around and watched everyone's limos pick everyone up and did peter greenaway imitations, which is just a minor variation on the john houseman voice i've been doing since i was a kid.

film: chaotic ana
director: julio medem
product of spain

i had high hopes for this one. i love all his other films. five years of waiting for his next film, and he comes up with this. some girl who lives in a cave is lured by charlotte rampling to come to an artist residence and thru hypnotism, finds out she's lived millions of other lives before. whereas his other films were playfully confusing at times, i couldn't care less about anything going on in this. and the last act comes out of nowhere with a message against american foreign policy. oh well... at least there's a scene on the same corner of the paul's boutique album cover. this still hasn't been released anywhere, so i guess it's still disappointing festival-goers all around the world.

------- ------- so far this year: ------- ------- -------

film: 35 rhums
director: claire denis
product of france

fantastic. alex descas is a train conductor who lives with his daughter and the film follows a couple of days into his relations with his co-workers, neighbors and friends. that's all you need to know really. the Q&A after the film was hilariously awful. someone asked if there was anything deeper to the father/daughter relationship, hint hint. i think the guy asking this wrote the review on twitch, because everyone else in the room was snickering. someone else didn't really ask a question but just rambled on about the colour scheme and things and then tacked on a useless question at the end, like why we always expect something to be lurking in the darkness at every scene where someone's back is shown to the camera and they look like they're going to be stabbed(?)... um, not me. someone else asked why everyone is so depressed in this movie, which they're not, they're just living their daily lives. claire denis made the best out of these questions, saying if her characters are depressed then she would've died a long time ago. someone else asked about the long scene where alex descas smokes a cigarette and stomps it out; "what is it that you're trying to convey?" i can't believe people actually ask that question anywhere outside of first-year film school. my answer: because alex descas smoking a cigarette is fucking hot, alright? i only wish adèle ado was in the film much longer.

i know there's only a few minutes and they want to blurp out the first thing that pops in their head, and i can't think of anything better to ask but these questions are not well thought out. at least the rest of the audience gets to laugh at the poor sap. some Q&As are interesting and sometimes they're amusingly hostile, but most of the time they make me want to skip the screening altogether and just order the dvd from amazon.co.uk six months later.

more to come. not much, i'm only planning to see less than five or so.

Advertisement

Advertisement